Whispering to each other behind cupped hands and shushing each other with giggles, the kids on board crowd around the open doorway to the cramped engine room when Yonas and I climb into the lower deck. The engine looks old, crusty, and dead.
“I tried to clean it out, but it seemed dry,” Yonas is saying, “but when I turned it on, it went boom! And salt water blew all over the wires.”
He’s holding up a small flashlight so I can see when I open the thing up. “Yeah,” I say, “looks pretty corroded.”
“I am a schoolteacher, what do I know from engines?”
“You don’t teach shop, I take it.”
“What is ‘shop’?”
“A class for woodworking, a little bit of mechanics. Practical stuff.”
“Algebra is very practical. Just slightly less so when dying of thirst on the open water.”
“I see what you mean. Hold that light up, will you?”
The engine is a brick, not even registering as a machine to my nanites. But I can tell, just by looking at it, that it is a simple matter of swapping a few wires to get it operational again. We cobble enough dry ones together from the hot plate in the tiny galley and the guts of Grandma’s handheld radio, which she parted with only when we convinced her it was a matter of life and death.
When I yell up for Yonas’s wife, Nyala, to try the ignition, the engine roars to life. Yonas and I high-five, and the jubilant family members take turns hugging me. I feel like I’m ten feet tall. I don’t need their boat to get to shore; I could swim the rest of the way myself. Now that their engine is fixed, I can just jump back into the water and go on my way like a happy merman.
But I stay. What I need is for a human being not to look at me as a tool or a terror, just as another person. That’s what Yonas and his group are giving me. By saving them, I’m really saving myself.
I take the wheel at Yonas’s request so he can concentrate on the map. We sail to a buoy marker on the map where he’s supposed to contact people on the mainland. He’s learned just enough Greek to follow these instructions. The voice on the other end of the radio tells us to wait until nightfall and go to a bit of coast already marked on the chart. Yonas’s interlocutor claims they’ve timed the coast guard patrols so we can just slip on by in the fog.
This turns out to be mostly true. I putt-putt my way as slow as I can. Lights from houses along the coast burn through the mist. Yonas tells me to kill the engine when he thinks we’ve reached the point marked on the map. When the fog parts, I see a large white van waiting atop a tiny cove of sand. It doesn’t take long for two Greeks in a rubber Zodiac raft to start heading in our direction.
I am not surprised they are surprised to see me. They let me help load the kids and Grandma into the raft. Yonas says they have to hurry because the next coast guard patrol will be by soon.
They load that first round of human cargo into the van, then come back for the adults. When Yonas hops down into the raft and I am the last one left on the tug, one of the Greeks doesn’t reach up to help me down as he did with the others. Not that I need his help, but it’s not very friendly.
“The deal was for twelve passengers, but you are thirteen,” he says to me in pretty good English. “Where’s my thousand euros?”
“They just picked me up out of the water about eight hours ago. Helped them with their engine trouble, then thought I’d stick around.”
“I was going to say, you don’t look very Ethiopian.” He takes a long drag on a hand-rolled cigarette. “Actually, I don’t know what the hell you do look like.”
I spread my hands. “Aren’t we all unique individuals?”
He doesn’t laugh. “You, my friend, are a stowaway. Which is not allowed. For eight hours of passage, you owe me a couple hundred, at least. Cash.”
“I lost my wallet. At the bottom of the sea.”
The guy curses in Greek and holds his hand out for me. “We’ll figure this out on shore. Christos has to get his boat back to the marina where its papers say it belongs.”
Christos and I exchange places. He roars off into the darkness in the tug while I take a seat on the raft with Yonas and the other adults. Should I tell them I’m actually six?
Once we reach shore, two more Greeks get out of the cab of the van. A third stands guard by the open back and grabs one of the kids when she tries to leap out to rush to her parents. He tosses her back into the van. I don’t see any weapons in the dark, but I have to believe they’re there.
“All right, everyone in the van, where the eyes of law can’t see,” the leader says as he quickly drags the Zodiac onto the beach. “Stowaway, we’ll decide how you work off your debt when we get there.”
Everyone but me starts walking up the beach to the white van.
“Yonas,” I call out. He stops and looks at me. “Don’t go with these guys. They’re not going to take you anywhere you want to go.”
That’s all it takes for guns to appear in all the smugglers’ hands. The leader pulls a snub-nose Smith & Wesson Model 36 from his waistband and presses it to my temple.
“Yet you still have to go there,” he says. “Walk.”
I jerk my head back faster than he can pull the trigger, but he nearly takes my nose off, not that that would have slowed me down much. I grab his wrist and his neck and swing him around so he’s got his revolver pointing at his own temple now. Everybody screams. The two guys on the sand level their own snub-noses at me. The leader bellows out to them in Greek. He thrashes in my grip, but I’ve got him fast.
“Listen! Hey! Listen up!” I shake my captive to get his attention. “You chuckleheads aren’t used to messing with anyone who knows how to fight back. Tell your stooges to toss their weapons into the sea, and we all get to walk away. I mean . . . you’ll be walking away. We’ll be taking that van.”
The fourth guy by the van pulls one of the little girls out and puts a gun to her head. It’s Nyala and Yonas’s youngest. They both try to run toward her, but the other two gun thugs on the beach restrain them and point Smith & Wessons at them.
The leader in my hands laughs. “Who’s in charge now, freak, huh? Not you! You let me go, or you spend all night burying bodies!”
“Idiots,” I mutter. “I really was going to let you go.”
I push the leader away from me, hard enough that he goes sprawling on his face in the sand. The other three, seeing me without protection, point their weapons at me and fire. I already have my revolver up, though, and take off the top of the head of the guy on my left. His shot goes wild. The others have shockingly good aim, hitting me twice in the torso and once in the left arm. The hits stagger me back, but not enough to make me miss. One guy gets it on the nose; the other up on the road takes it in the neck. They both drop.
The leader is staggering away, kicking up great gouts of sand as he scrambles toward the tree line. I whirl and am about ready to shoot him in the back when Yonas stands in between me and him. He fixes me with dark, mournful eyebrows.
“That’s enough,” he says.
Anger burns through me at Yonas denying me the kill. It takes me a second or two to lower the revolver. By then the leader has already disappeared into the early-morning gloom.
I look at the faces of the rest of Yonas’s family. His daughter has buried her face in Nyala’s side, but one fearful eye remains trained at me. Nyala points at me and cries something out to Yonas.
I look down and see what she sees: The wounds and blood already disappearing, being absorbed into the blank whiteness of my skin like water down a drain. The nanomachines even take the lead of the bullet and turn it into flesh, skin, viscera. Life made out of death.
The shame hits me all at once. Killing’s become all too easy for me. Second nature. These regular civilians don’t know what to think. They see a monster, even if it’s one on their side.
“You have somewhere to go?” I ask Yonas.
“My cousin has a restaurant in Athens. She’s offered to let us stay with her in exchange for working at her place.”
“Does he know that?” I nod at where the leader disappeared.
Yonas shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“You’d better hope not.” Because if he knows, since we left him alive, he might come looking for you there, I don’t say out loud. I have a feeling the human traffickers were never going to take Yonas’s people to his cousin’s restaurant; they had some other grim servitude in mind for them.
Most of the migrants climb into the back of the van. Yonas gets into the cab. The smugglers left the keys in the ignition. So he starts it up. I’m not sure where I stand with the family, so I stay on the beach looking at him.
Yonas drives the van around in a circle, then stops, idling, and opens the passenger-side door. “Ray, what are you waiting for? We have to get out of here.”
I can’t help but grin. “No argument here.” I climb next to him and slam the door shut, and he motors off into the night.
* * *
The drive to Athens involves first going over ridged mountains dotted with small trees, then, finally, driving through the mountains in mostly deserted tunnels. No sounds but the roll of the wheels echo off dimly lit walls.
When the van comes out on the other side of the last tunnel, it’s raining, the drops startling us as they suddenly scatter across the windshield. It’s coming down hard, and the road is glistening and slick, so Yonas slows to a crawl as he maneuvers the van down a long, serpentine road.
We turn a bend, and the city is there, modern buildings studded with satellite dishes and ancient temples straddling green hills, graffiti and streetlights, extending out to the harbor. The underlit Parthenon looms over all from the massive lump of the Acropolis. No matter where we go in the narrow streets, filled with angrily honking cab drivers, I can feel the temple watching us, even if I can’t see it over the red-tiled roofs at the moment.
I’m happy to be in a big metropolis because I can feel its crisscrossing field of wireless communications—cellular, satellite, Wi-Fi, and so on—comforting me like a cherished childhood blanket. Out in the middle of the ocean, I couldn’t tap into my machine-ally abilities without sending up a “here I am” flare for PRS. In the telecom stew of a big city, though, I’m just another stray morsel. My initial signal is extremely obscured, and I bounce it off multiple node stations around the world and in low Earth orbit until my actual location is nearly impossible for Rising Spirit cyberspies to trace backward. They’ll get lost chasing their own tail in a Bitcoin server array in a Bangkok suburb or inside a secondhand desktop plugged into a troll farm in St. Petersburg.
I’m now free to do complex computing in relative anonymity, like accessing translation services that let me read and speak rudimentary Greek. The faded street signs unscramble before my eyes into words I can understand. Yonas pulls the van up on the curb of a plaza labeled Monastiraki Square. The rain has driven everyone away this late at night, and only the arched subway station seems to be open.
Yonas takes a sealed Ziploc baggie out of his pocket and removes a hand-drawn map. He leads us down the wide row of a sleeping flea market, shutters drawn across stalls hawking Parthenon T-shirts and Spartan figures with round shields and long spears. He makes a bunch of abrupt turns down various narrow lanes, and if I hadn’t been following our progress with satellites, I would have been completely lost.
He comes to the back of a building down a wide cobblestoned alley and, underneath a tree, knocks on a door once, twice. It doesn’t take long for an Ethiopian woman to answer the door. She’s a few years older than Yonas and looks neither happy nor surprised to see us. Behind her a young girl about thirteen years old is sliding trays into an oven. The sharp, vinegary smell of what I first take to be baking sourdough wafts out the door and awakens my hunger like a startled guard dog, barking loudly.
Yonas and his cousin, whose name I gather to be Liya, bicker a bit in a language the network quickly identifies as Amharic, the main tongue of Ethiopia. I set my autotranslator in motion, and by the time she waves a dismissive hand in my direction, I’ve got the top few thousand verbs and nouns down pat.
“What about him?” Liya nods at me. “You say you bring me workers, Yonas, but this one is hardly front-of-the-house material.”
“Do you need a dishwasher?” I ask in Amharic with what must be a really weird accent, judging from the expression on Yonas’s and Liya’s faces. “I’m strong, I’m fast, and I only need to sleep about once a week.”
Liya blinks dubiously at me. “He’s not crazy, is he?” she asks Yonas while keeping me in view. “Because I can’t deal with that, I just can’t, I have too much else to do—”
“Liya, Liya, don’t worry, he’s not crazy, he just, ah, has a rare skin condition,” Yonas pleads with her, palms pressed together. “He’s saved all our lives. Twice! We owe him.”
“You owe him. I don’t owe him.” Still, she throws up her hands. “Fine! But he has to find his own place to spend the night. With all of you staying, I’ve run out of beds.”
“Not a problem,” I say. I don’t plan on sleeping anyway, particularly now that dawn is starting to glow around the edges of the market buildings. I manage to beg the kitchen girl for some finished crepes—injera, not sourdough, I am told—that are so deliciously spongy and heavy at the same time, rolled up like fancy napkins.
After staving off my hunger, I find a convenience store on the corner advertising disposable phones. I sit on the curb and wait for the owner to arrive and open up. It takes a couple hours, and the city wakes up around me. Those incredible morning sensations: car exhaust mixing with crisp morning air, pigeons discovering stale bread dumped onto the sidewalk the night before, trucks roaring, metal shutters clattering open.
I dug a couple hundred euros in cash out of the pockets of the smugglers lying on the beach and spend twenty of them to buy a burner phone. I rip it out of its package but then stare at it for longer than I should, wondering if it’s smart to use it.
Back when I was floating on the Mediterranean, going through my various selves, I tried to empty my thoughts completely and see if the core of me would speak to me, if whatever residual memories I might have could bubble to the surface and, like a fisherman without a rod, I could grab on to them with both hands.
I did catch something, a number, which depressed me. What else would a machine have as a core belief but a number? It was ten digits, which implied a phone number.
My nanites are able to pinpoint the current location of the number, and given the difference in time zones, it should be just past midnight there. I walk back to Monastiraki Square, already filling up with tourists and vendors and panhandlers. I shift my skin color to look slightly healthier in the glaring early-morning light. And I dial the number.
It rings way too many times for me to be comfortable. My heart is pounding.
I am just about to hang up when the ringing stops with a click. The sound of fumbling. Then, a high voice.
“Hey, who is this?” Still sleepy, I must have just woken her up.
“Sorry to bother you,” I say, realizing that, like an idiot, I had no idea what to say if another person actually answered, “but, uh, could you tell me who you are first?”
A short pause.
“Bloodshot?” His voice cracks. I’m talking to a young boy, not a girl.
“Yes . . .” I can barely stand. People keep walking past me in the square, but I am on another planet. “Please, sorry, who am I talking to? I may not remember you.”
“Oh, yeah. That makes sense. But I remember you. It’s Clark.”
Jeez.
How old is this kid?